Month: January 2019

Critical Thinking, Higher Education

The Optimistic Critical Thinker

Missy Alexander

And we’re off.  The spring semester has begun at WCSU and most other universities in the US.  Faculty have passed out their syllabi and done their best to set expectations and inspire their students to embrace the learning ahead. Students are purchasing course materials (or finding free alternatives, if they’re lucky) and preparing for their best semester ever.  It is how we all want to begin, with optimism and a desire to get the most out of our learning experiences.

As we start the semester, I’ve been reflecting on the notion of “critical thinking.” We’ve had a lot of conversation on our campus about the meaning of those words. When we transitioned to our new general education curriculum a few years ago, we included a critical thinking competency in our requirements.  We then launched into debates about what courses do and do not teach critical thinking.  The problem seemed to be not one of inclusion, but rather a lack of ability to exclude courses from this category.

As I see it, the heart of the problem lay in the distinction between teaching students foundational tools for evaluating arguments of all kinds vs. the overall outcomes of a liberal arts degree.  In a nutshell, a general education course with a critical thinking designation should spend some time on the components of an argument, the concept of paradox or logical contradiction, and the evaluation of evidence.  This is distinct from the many (all) classes that rely on critical thinking skills to properly engage course material.  The ability to use critical thinking skills is indeed an important outcome of an undergraduate degree, but I argue that using the skills and introducing them are not the same thing.

There was more to this argument, of course.  After all, we are the academy.  We live to dig into the fine points, find the contradictions or lack of specificity, and identify next questions.  We are professional critical thinkers and we are never done. This is fine for faculty and administration, but when it comes to students, I think we need to be a little gentler.

Let me be clear, I think all students should be exposed to good, healthy skepticism and debate. Higher education has an obligation to demonstrate this, both to support good habits of mind and to serve as a counter-weight to a media environment that promotes both cynicism and gullibility. In a world where our social media routinely move us into echo chambers, instead of diverse opinions and ideas, this obligation has reached a level of urgency like never before.

But, we have to be careful.  Identifying evidence as untrustworthy can easily spiral into conversations about not being able to trust any evidence. Showing our students that long-held theories have been proven false, can lead to a feeling that no theories should be trusted.  Finding logical paradoxes can lead to a sense that nothing is resolvable.  In other words, the important habits of mind that we aim to cultivate, the habits that empower our students to make reasoned arguments and informed decisions, can also lead to a sense of hopelessness and cynicism.

So, how to move forward?  As we teach our students the histories of the ideas that we no longer find productive or true, we must also teach them the arguments that led to their failure and the paths forward.   We must teach them to ask why it might have been reasonable to think the idea was good or true?  What new evidence or thinking or event helped to undermine that idea or theory? What progress, if any, resulted from the change?  We have to help our students see the progress in the falling of old truths. It is that sense of progress that helps us protect ourselves from cynicism.

Then we have to ask our students the next question: where are the seeds of doubt in the new theory, idea, or fact? We have to help them start to explore that new question, at least in small ways, so that they have a sense that they can search for answers.  This is where the true value of an undergraduate degree lies.  We are not charged with the distribution of facts, those are available everywhere, we are charged with cultivating the understanding of how to challenge facts in ways that produce new answers and possibilities.

This is where I see the heart of teaching critical thinking. We must develop in our students the confidence and skills necessary to challenge facts and evidence and the desire to pursue the next set of answers. The belief that there are answers to be pursued and that those answers might be within our grasp is about as optimistic as any rational person can be.

So here’s to an optimistic semester, filled with questions, contradictions, and the desire for more understanding.

 

 

 

equity, Higher Education, Inclusion

Adjusting for Equity

Missy Alexander

It is Martin Luther King Day and as I paused to reflect on the meaning of the day, I noticed yet another challenge to admissions policies that factor in race has been launched. Inside Higher Ed reported that Students for Fair Admissions (the same group suing Harvard) is suing University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill over differential admissions standards based on race.  In part, they note that the ACT scores required of white and Asian students are higher than those required of African-American and Latino students.  Sigh.

This is just one of the many challenges to affirmative action that have taken place over  the years.  Before we focused on differences in test scores, folks complained about quotas.  I recall discussing this in classes 20 years ago.  Many of my students were angered by the very notion of a quota. It seemed to fly in the face of their assumptions about merit and equality.  At that time, I had a Jamaican-American student who raised her hand and stated simply: “So, you’re upset about 2% of the spots being saved for me.  What about the 98% being saved for you?” This simple argument revealed the difference  between equity and equality.

Twenty years later and we’re still struggling with those distinctions.  Deep in the values of the United States is a notion that upward mobility is within our grasp if we only work for it.  But it is hard for us to grasp the difference in levels of work required depending on where we start on that economic ladder.

Add to this the discomfort we feel about racial categories.  We have managed to make them complicated and multi-dimensional, which is to the good, and these efforts have left many people feeling that we should be moving away from simplistic categories. Our discomfort may be a sign of progress, but the experiences and opportunities we have are still tied up in the biases we carry toward people who do not look the same as us.  And those biases still skew towards those who aren’t white.

Still, sorting admissions by race nags at us.  It doesn’t feel quite right.  So, how about we shift the conversation.  Since K-12 environments have a very strong impact on our likelihood of attending college, why not adjust the admissions process with that in mind?  Instead of looking at race, let’s adjust SAT (or ACT) scores based on K-12 context.

Here are three things that are regularly reported on K-12 school districts in CT that could be used to adjust SAT scores: Percent of students who qualify for free lunch, percent of students who are English Language Learners, and the  percent of students who attend college after graduation.  Districts with higher numbers of students who qualify for free lunch and who are English Language Learners tend to have lower average SAT scores than districts with less need in these areas. These two variables are associated with all sorts of barriers to achieving high SAT scores. ELL students, for example, usually don’t have family members who can help with homework because folks at home don’t speak English.  Students who qualify for free lunch rarely have access to summers at academic camps, or tutors, etc. Districts addressing these needs are likely to have fewer resources available for the niceties of field trips, SAT test-prep classes, or robust academic extra-curriculars. These two issues are then likely to impact the percent of graduates in a district that attend college.

Here is my proposed adjustment.  Take the difference between a perfect SAT score (1600) and the district average.  Multiply that difference first by the percentage of students who receive free lunch and then by the percentage who are English Language Learners. Then  determine the percentage of students who don’t attend college from the district and multiply that by the same number as the other two variables.  Add these three numbers to the SAT scores for an equity adjustment.

Here’s how it looks.

District 1 District 2 District 3
Base combined SAT Scores 968 1076 1227
Difference from 1600 632 524 373
District ELL Percentage 14.4 1.5 0
District Free Lunch Percentage 44.3 21.2 1.8
College Attendance Percentage 69.9 79 90.7
ELL Adjustment 91 8 0
Free Lunch Adjustment 280 111 7
College attendance adjustment 190 110 37
Total Points Added 561 229 44
Adjusted Average SAT Score 1529 1305 1271

Now, I’m sure it won’t surprise you that District 1 is more ethnically diverse than District 3 and obviously the free lunch numbers point to families in need of support.  But, the focus here is on a holistic experience that results from being in a less advantaged school district.  As a general rule, all students in District 1 will have less opportunity to participate in the enrichment opportunities that lead to high SAT scores, so everyone attending that school should be awarded the additional points.

This takes race out of the admissions questions while at the same time addressing the structural racism that results from economic segregation everywhere.

We could go farther.  For example, only 16% of the students in District 1 will have successfully earn AP credit, 70% of the students in District 3 will.  Should we make an adjustment? Students from poor families will not be able to go to summer enrichment programs because they will be working. Should we make an adjustment?  Students attending schools in neighborhoods with high levels of crime will have difficulty fully focusing on their studies because they are dealing with trauma. Should we make an adjustment?  And there are many more variables we might consider.

But if we just start with these three, perhaps we can achieve what we hoped to achieve when we starting asking questions about our admissions policies in the first place. Because equality will never be reached without some level of equity.

 

 

Credit Hour, DeVos, Higher Education, Innovative Pedagogies

Western Governors and the future of higher education.

Missy Alexander

Well, unsurprisingly, Western Governors University was issued a reprieve by the US Department of Education on Friday.  Despite clear violations of the existing guidelines that distinguish distance education from correspondence education via “regular and substantive interaction between students and faculty” they will not have to pay back $713 million in Federal Financial Aid.  This decision lines up neatly with the recent proposals by DeVos to revise definitions of the credit hour and expand “instructors” to “members of the instructional team.”

Here it is folks, that point in the road we’ve been traveling down for the last twenty years in higher education–we must clearly articulate the value of the contact between students and faculty.

The ride to this point has included many stops.

The higher education community argued seriously and productively about online education. We know that learning online is not the same as the classroom experience, but when done well, it can be a good learning environment.  It does afford access to busy adults who cannot get to a campus.  If the students are ready for online learning, and that is an important if, they can get a good education online.

At the same time, we have embraced (to various degrees) the ways in which new learning technologies can enhance the classroom.  We’ve been putting supplementary materials online, allowing students many opportunities to encounter and review materials important to their courses.  Often there are group assignments, review tests, or even supplementary explanations in video or written format to support student success.  Sometimes we call it flipping the classroom.  Sometimes we call it homework. Either way, it points out that learning can happen independently, with materials curated by a faculty member.

We have also embraced the diagnostic potential of digital texts and evaluations.  Pearson, famously, is at the forefront of this, turning textbooks, into interactive learning environments, and adjusting material based on the responses of the students.  Adaptive learning is being used in classrooms to try to enhance student success.  Those classrooms may be supervised by faculty, but are frequently filled with tutors and TAs.

Let’s not forget the routine use of graduate assistants and teaching assistants as part of our “instructional teams.”  This is an old practice that frequently limits student contact with faculty.  Over the years we have moved to better training for graduate assistants, requiring classes in teaching methods, or at least bringing GAs together for weekly meetings about the material they are covering. Like distance learning, questions were asked about the effectiveness of the graduate assistants, and we had to move to demonstrate their value.  That impulse was a good one, but it leaves us with more questions.

In all of these steps, we moved toward more carefully defined outcomes.  These include learning outcomes in courses and degrees, as well as student success measures such as retention, timely graduation, and post-graduate activities.  These outcomes became points of comparison for all of the above – online vs. on-ground, traditional vs. interactive texts, student success in courses taught by GAs vs. FT-Faculty.  It turns out that when we compare institutions who serve similar students, and follow similar definitions of the goals of an undergraduate education, the outcomes are surprisingly similar. (Take a look at https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/ to compare some of these outcomes.)

So now what?  We’ve got to get serious about defining the quality of learning that takes place when a student has regular interaction with a person with advanced knowledge of a discipline.  We have to be able to show why that matters in the whole of a student’s education.  We have to show that these benefits are a matter of equity and that we should not just provide that kind of education to the elite. And we have to do it honestly, assessing the weaknesses in the educational paradigms we’ve created in an effort to truly transform.

I was struck by the final paragraph in Inside Higher Education’s coverage of this decision.  They quote Spiros Protopsaltis, the director of George Mason University’s Center for Education Policy and Evaluation and a former Education Department official,

“However, the critical issue is that we should not lower the bar to accommodate any particular online model, whether it’s WGU or any other school, but instead we should raise the bar for quality and rigor,” he said. “Given the evidence on the importance of interaction between students and instructors for student success, requiring and enforcing such interaction is imperative.”

Just because one institution has strong outcomes while failing to meet that standard, he said, does not mean the Education Department should lower the bar for the entire online industry.

Here’s the thing, Protopsaltis has acknowledged that the WGU model has strong outcomes.  This is the real issue, folks.  If we don’t address the reasons for those strong outcomes, and make a case for something more, then WGU is our future.  Or perhaps the future is just some really great libraries.

 

DeVos, Evaluation, Higher Education

Under Construction: Peer Review

Missy Alexander

On Monday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, released a list of policy proposals as part of negotiated rule making related to the Higher Education Act.  While I have many questions about the goals of these revisions and how they might impact those most susceptible to education scams, I am intrigued by the part of the list that addresses accreditation.

Several of the policies suggested appear to be a direct assault on regional accreditors.  The reasons that they are a target are complicated, but one such reason seems to be a sense that they are creating barriers for innovation in education.  This argument is fraught with contradictions and for-profit motives, to be sure, but the role of accrediting bodies that are wedded to traditional non-profit educational institutions is not unworthy of review.

Over the past 20 years, regional accreditors have truly transformed from evaluation criteria based on things universities have (faculty, libraries, students, and buildings) to things universities do (retention, graduation, learning/degree outcomes, and graduation placements).  This transformation was, in part, provoked by the emergence of for-profit, online education and our need to grapple with how to evaluate learning in these differing environments.  We resisted, argued, and then re-imagined our responsibilities. We maintained our right to define the parameters of “quality” education, but we no longer argue that we can’t assess our efforts.

As we all became (relatively) comfortable with program assessment and the focus on outcomes, our accrediting bodies asked us to improve our approaches and make it a regular part of what we do.  In the process, we opened the door to developing quality online education because we articulated what our graduates should know.  Whatever the environment, similar degrees should have similar outcomes.  This is the best possible outcome of a robust peer review process. Relying on faculty and administrators from other universities to look at what we do and provide educated and responsible feedback works in this system.  We understand what we’re looking at because there is a lot of common ground. Let’s be honest, this change was hard.  We didn’t like doing it, but here we are.

Now we face something new and the peer review system is going to struggle to define its role again.  In recent years there have been closures of large for-profit and small non-profit educational institutions and, along with those closures have come questions about the oversight provided by accreditors. The withdrawal of accreditation is powerful. It will close an institution, so it is imperative that these bodies develop good ways of monitoring finances. As participants in peer review accreditation processes, we are going to have to figure out reasonable questions to ask that can strengthen evaluation of less traditional and traditional educational institutions alike.

During an accreditation visit, when a university or college is struggling financially, peers are asked to offer feedback. This can be problematic. Most of us from the non-profit world can read a budget and see shortfalls in funding, but we are less prepared to provide insight into how to recover from that shortfall.  Evaluating quality of education and the supporting infrastructures of faculty governance and transparency are things we are comfortable with.  Developing plans for capturing market shares and differentiation of our educational “products” does not come easily to us.

At the heart of this challenge is not that we don’t value or support innovation, something DeVos seems to think we are doing, but that we see innovation in terms of learning, not in terms of money.  We are not blind to changing work landscapes, we respond to those all the time, but we do so on the assumption that we are meeting a societal need, not a bottom line need.  Now we are faced with considering some of the questions that a market oriented evaluation might raise. We will argue and resist, but then we must figure it out for three very important reasons.

Reason 1: Identifying a problem (financial or otherwise) during peer review will not be helpful if we don’t offer some guidance about how to recover. Ours is a collaborative process where we learn from each other.  Ignoring the learning that needs to take place in the financial category makes peer evaluation a threat, not a helpful process.  We have to figure out how to handle this part as a true mentoring opportunity.

Reason 2: We need to continue to impact the definitions of quality and viability, just like we did in the early conversations about online degrees.  By being part of that conversation, we made sure that the measures for online learning were not narrowly evaluated on content delivery, but on learning experiences. We need to shape the questions surrounding financial viability the same way, so that we don’t end up with profit as a primary goal. We want reasonable comparisons to be made between for-profit and non-profit institutions, comparisons that keep students at the center of all we do.

Reason 3: Education is not about widgets.  Students are complex and require nuanced educational experiences that reflect understanding their unique backgrounds and needs.  And the focus of our degrees must anticipate not the job of the moment, but the long-term skills and habits of mind that our students will need as the landscape of work continuously changes. Our traditional, non-profit structures facilitate that nuanced, long-term thinking in ways that are not supported in organizations that produce quarterly reports. This is the thinking valued by regional accreditors associated with these types of educational organizations.

Higher education in the United States has long been built on peer review. It is our strength and it is what allows us to be innovative. One look at the inventions, discoveries, and even changing degree titles will tell the story of responsible, not reactive, innovation. This is supported by the integrity of our peer review processes and we need to hold onto them, because we know our context best.

Yet we are in for some hard work as we reshape the questions we are asking of each other.  Demographics have changed the context for non-profit and for-profit organizations alike.  Finances will have to be considered. But, the questions we ask must reflect our commitment to creating excellent learning environments for all. If they do, the value of our accrediting processes will remain strong.